Why did we make you read about a cockfight in Bali?
What does it have to do with customer insight? Or restaurant business? Or business in general?
Photo credits: Rene Bastiaanssen. Flickr.com.
Clifford Geertz – Thick Description as the aim of ethnography
• Rich and nuanced way of describing life in a given culture – winking vs. twitching.
• Balinese cockfight as an arrival story – getting into a community.
• When in Rome…
• Micro – macro connection
“As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it is men.”
What is culture?
Not just high arts in museums, theatres and books
It’s around us, so close that it can be hard to see. Shared phenomenon – invisible and tangible.
What is culture?
Different notions:
• The total way of life of a people• The social legacy the individual acquires from his
group• A way of thinking, feeling and believing• How a group of people behave• A storehouse of pooled learning• A set of standardized orientation to re-current
problems• A set of techniques for adjusting both to the
external environment and to other men
(Kluckhohn in the Mirror for Man)
”Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”
Clifford Geertz
Different kinds of cultures:
National cultures – sub-cultures – Multi-culture – Western culture – Eastern Culture
Ethnography in modern settings – studying different social worlds
Photo credits: National Eye Institute. Flickr.com.
Studying the experiences in different worlds: properties vs. aspects
• Data points as facts vs. experiencing the aspects
• Biological sex vs. cultural gender (masculinity – femininity)
• Properties of entities vs. relationships between people and brands/people
• Correctness vs. truth
• Detached vs. embedded
• Object vs. subject (reflection of assumptions)
• Believe in conclusive facts vs. doubt in “near truths”
• Ethnography as making something familiar strange – and strange familiar
Process of sensemaking
1. Frame the problem as a phenomenon2. Collect the data3. Look for patterns4. Create key insights5. Build the business impact
(Madsbjerg & Rasmussen, 2014)
Attention is finite – plan what you are observing in the field
SOURCE: A DATA COLLECTOR’S FIELD GUIDE NATASHA MACK • CYNTHIA WOODSONG KATHLEEN M. MACQUEEN • GREG GUEST • EMILY NAMEY